We present the first attempt to construct a long-run historical measure of subjective wellbeing using language corpora derived from millions of digitized books. While existing measures of subjective wellbeing go back to at most the 1970s, we can go back at least 200 years further using our...

We present the first attempt to construct a long-run historical measure of subjective wellbeing using language corpora derived from millions of digitized books. While existing measures of subjective wellbeing go back to at most the 1970s, we can go back at least 200 years further using our...

National life satisfaction is an important way to measure societal well-being and since 2011 has been used to judge the effectiveness of government policy across the world. However, there is a paucity of historical data making limiting long-run comparisons with other data. We construct a new...

Using micro data from contemporary Germany, this paper studies the connection between Protestantism and modern-day labor market outcomes. To address the endogeneity in self-declared religion, I exploit a provision in a sixteenth-century peace treaty, which determined the geographic distribution...

We usually consider it progress when a country begins to shift from an autocratic to a democratic form of government. However, the introduction of elections and other early trappings of democracy often has the perverse effect of exacerbating political instability. It also increases the...

In 1945, much of Europe lay scared with the devastation of six years of war. The great struggle over Europe that had begun in 1939 with the invasion of Poland ended with the capture of Berlin. People from the British Isles to the Soviet heartland had felt the pain of war and had seen their lands...

This paper offers a comparison of government centralization in the United States and in Germany. After briefly laying out the history of federalism in both countries, we identify the instruments of centralization at work. It is argued that an initial constitutional framework of competitive...

This paper postulates a life cycle model of university entrepreneurialism at the national level. Based on the analysis, this paper identifies two fundamental sources of such entrepreneurialism: 1) the institutional anchoring of the university of a public-private hybrid form in organization and...

Die Debatte über eine Finanzierungsreform des deutschen Krankenversicherungssystems hat in der letzten Zeit viele Konzepte hervorgebracht. Die Vorschläge reichen von der Stabilisierung des Status quo in Form von Kopfpauschalen über die Einführung verschiedener Formen eines...